Barack Obama says US ‘will not be terrorised’ after carnage
Barack Obama says US ‘will not be terrorised’ after carnage
The mass shooting in California is being probed as “an act of terrorism”, the FBI said late Friday as President Barack Obama insisted that the United States “will not be terrorised” and renewed his call for tighter gun control measures in a weekly address on Saturday.
“It is entirely possible that these two attackers were radicalised to commit this act of terror,” Mr Obama said.
Mr Obama said in his weekly address that the Islamic State (ISIS) and other terrorist groups “are actively encouraging people — around the world and in our country — to commit terrible acts of violence, often times as lone wolf actors”.
“We are Americans,” he added. “We will uphold our values — a free and open society. We are strong. And we are resilient. And we will not be terrorised.”
On the other hand, FBI director James Comey told reporters: “The investigation so far has developed indications of radicalisation by the killers, and of potential inspiration by foreign terrorist organisations.”
But he said there was no indication that Syed Farook, 28, and his 29-year-old Pakistani wife Tashfeen Malik were part of any network. Authorities earlier had put her age at 27.
The developments come two days after the couple massacred 14 people and wounded 21 others at a year-end office party in San Bernardino — the deadliest mass shooting in the United States since the Newtown school massacre in 2012.
“We have uncovered evidence that has led us to learn of extensive planning,” David Bowdich, the assistant FBI director in charge of the Los Angeles office, told reporters.
“There’s a number of pieces of evidence that has essentially pushed us off the cliff to say we are now investigating this as an act of terrorism.”
He said investigators were examining a Facebook posting in which Malik is believed to have pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, made around the time of Wednesday’s attack.
The massacre, if proven to be terror-related, would be the deadliest such assault on American soil since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The ISIS hailed the perpetrators as “soldiers” of its caliphate, without explicitly claiming the deadly attack.
In its English-language radio broadcast, the group praised the Wednesday shooting.
“Two soldiers of the Khilafah (caliphate) executed an attack on the Inland Regional Centre in San Bernardino, California,” the ISIS radio broadcast said in English.
The ISIS refers to the swathe of territory it controls in Syria and Iraq as an Islamic caliphate.
The group’s Arabic-language radio broadcast earlier in the day had referred to the attackers as “supporters of the Islamic State”.
The English-language broadcast said the attackers were “killed in the path of Allah”.
But the group stopped short of issuing an official claim of responsibility for the shooting in the format it has used in the past for attacks in Paris and elsewhere.
Separately, Baby toys, shredded files, a Quran, computer paraphernalia: the home of the California shooters was bizarrely — and controversially — thrown open to the media on Friday, offering a glimpse of the life of the couple behind the carnage.
Media crews were given access by the landlord to the two-story townhouse where they lived with their six-month-old daughter.
In a surreal scrum, dozens of journalists flooded into the home in Redlands, jostling for space as they rifled through children’s toys and family photos for clues to what drove the couple to commit mass murder.
